Roll Call (August 16, 2022)
I wept in church yesterday. Didn’t see it coming, but during the refrain of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” there it was. No one sings the old gospel songs like that anymore. Evangelicals perform what they call “praise music,” a kind of dreamy meditation that makes few demands musically and even fewer theologically. We Episcopalians, on the other hand, go for more dignified fare straight out of the 1982 Hymnal with reliable standards like “Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies” or “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.” “Wonderful Grace of Jesus,” with its rumbling bass lines is a tad too raucous for God’s Frozen Chosen.
But I was far outside the ambit of Episcopal respectability to which I had gravitated more than four decades earlier. A message on Facebook had altered my plans for the weekend. I had agreed months earlier to attend my fiftieth high school reunion, a stretch for someone who was shy and introverted fifty years ago and only marginally less shy and just as introverted half a century later. The reunion itself was lovely, a tribute to the organizational skills of conscientious classmates who are all members, I’m sure, of the clean-desk fraternity. We traded reminiscences among ourselves. Our homeroom teacher, Mr. Tannatt, was known as a disciplinarian, for example. He called the roll, and the rest of the period passed in silence.
For me, the reunion was both satisfying and alienating, though less of the latter than I’d expected. A few of those in attendance actually professed to remember a nebbish classmate whose fundamentalist scruples ruled out any social activities in high school. (In the run-up to reunion, I came across recollections about the senior class trip to Washington, D.C. I wasn’t aware there was a class trip, which I suppose was just as well because I’d never be allowed to participate anyway; the “fellowship” at Bible camp would have been more “wholesome”—my parents’ preferred adjective—than anything I would find among my “worldly” classmates.)
My original itinerary for the weekend had me leaving the reunion and heading more-or-less directly to the airport for the journey home. Then a message arrived from a name I hadn’t heard in decades. The church where my father served as pastor in the mid-1960s was having an anniversary celebration—130 years—and would I be interested in coming?
The Evangelical Free Church in Bay City, Michigan, was looking to replace its longtime (twenty-seven years) pastor back in 1963. We were living then in rural southern Minnesota, literally surrounded by corn fields, and the move to the “big city” had been traumatic for nine-year-old me. The parsonage on South DeWitt Street was bracketed on both ends of the block by three-lane, one-way streets, each headed in the opposite direction. The sound of sirens pierced the night, and for months after our move I willed myself to stay awake to warn my family about the inevitable intruder. I lay there, holding my breath when a car passed by on South DeWitt, charting hysterical patterns on the ceiling and listening carefully to determine if there was cause for alarm.
The church in Bay City had begun a building program in the early 1960s, but it had stalled, and my father, whose ambition has become apparent to me only since his death, saw an opportunity. The congregation was meeting in the basement of the unfinished structure when we arrived in the summer of 1963, and Pastor Balmer soon rallied the troops. He produced a banner that read Above the Floor in ’64, and the contributions began to trickle in from this predominantly blue-collar congregation. The general contractor for the project was a member of the church, and some arrangement was struck whereby congregants supplied much of the labor, from masonry and painting to drywall and landscaping. Aside from the regular programing—Sunday school and church Sunday morning, Sunday evening service, Wednesday night prayer meeting, youth group activities—every week included several “work nights” at the church, which I recall as convivial affairs, everyone pitching in with hammers and paintbrushes and a tall tale or two about a recent hunting trip or fishing expedition.
My younger brother picked me up at the Detroit airport early Sunday morning, and we headed north to the lovely church, dedicated January 10, 1965, and a flood of memories. This was the place I was baptized—by full immersion, by the way, which qualifies me as a lower-case baptist. David and I found an empty pew halfway up the gospel side (though those in attendance wouldn’t recognize the term) and settled in for the anniversary celebration. Sandwiched among the praise music, the announcements, the sermon and recognition of visitors, the pastor decided to lead the congregation in a medley of songs from the hymnal.
After a couple verses of “Send the Light” and “Faith Is the Victory,” the piano segued into “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” and the tears began. I remembered singing that hymn many times in that space; the song was one of my father’s favorites. “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time will be no more / And the morning breaks eternal, bright and fair / When the saved of earth shall gather over on the golden shore / And the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”
The refrain turned to water. I cried for my father, a farm boy from Nebraska whose discovery of Jesus altered the direction of his life. He boarded a train for seminary in Chicago and became a hard-working (and yes, ambitious) preacher who had no father himself but whose name was spoken in reverent tones on this Sunday and who, despite our sometimes troubled relationship, I missed just as acutely as when he migrated to that golden shore twenty-five years ago. I cried for my longsuffering mother, deceased more recently, whose defining task in life was caring for a workaholic husband and their five sons, and who struggled to find an alternate identity in the years following their departure.
I wept for my parents-in-law, both facing their final, uncertain journey, and for one of my long-ago acquaintances at the Bay City church, a man slightly older than I who had a wicked sense of humor and who, I learned yesterday, had died alone of AIDS in his Chicago apartment.
I cried for a woman in the congregation just a couple of rows in front of me. Her family had endured unspeakable tragedies—the deaths of an infant and a young boy, a suicide, and a death from cancer among her siblings, then the death of her husband, and then an unexpected romance and marriage that ended eighteen months later in another cancer casualty. Job had nothing on that family, and yet Sandi was cheerful as ever, grateful for God’s goodness.
I wept tears of regret because I had disappointed someone I love and tears of gratitude that the task of healing that breach was well underway.
“On that bright and cloudless morning when the dead in Christ shall rise, / And the glory of His resurrection share; / When his chosen ones shall gather to their home beyond the skies, / And the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”
I’m no theologian, but my rudimentary understanding of the faith assures me that somehow the bubble of grace encircles us all, that despite the troubles and sorrows and disappointments of this life, we can look for better days ahead—that somehow, despite our bumbling, the pain we cause and the pain we endure, Jesus takes our sad, broken lives and makes us whole.
When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.
Christmas Eve & the Pursuit of Perfection (December 24, 2021)
It starts with a single voice piercing the darkness.
Once in royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little Child.
The voice of the boy soprano, pure and otherworldly, fills the candlelight space of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. The choir joins for the second verse as they process, robed in scarlet cassocks topped by white cottas, past the rood screen and into the chancel. The congregation joins in on the third stanza, and the organ rumbles before the final verse. Glorious music filling glorious space.
Thus opens the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve, a British institution begun in 1918, just a few weeks after Armistice Day brought World War I to a close. The Bidding Prayer for this service, read by the dean of the chapel, takes on a poignancy in light of the fearsome casualties of what was then known as the Great War: “Lastly let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom we for evermore are one.”
The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in Cambridge has been on my bucket list for years now, and last Christmas, the first with no parish responsibilities in a long time, provided the opportunity. I’d listened to the service every year on NPR, of course, but I was interested not only in the service itself; I also wanted to take a look behind the scenes.
King’s College Choir was founded by Henry VI for the singing of daily services in the magnificent Gothic chapel, which was completed in 1515. The choir itself consists of fourteen adult male choral scholars and sixteen boy choristers, who are students at King’s College School. They sing regularly at the chapel and tour around the world, but their signature performance is Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve.
The service has been transmitted around the globe by the British Broadcasting Corporation since 1928. These days, approximately 30 million people listen to the live Christmas Eve broadcast on BBC, NPR and through the internet. The broadcast illustrates the tentacular reach of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which in turn is a vestige – perhaps the final vestige – of the British Empire.
The Nine Lessons and Carols liturgy interweaves Christmas carols with readings from the scriptures. Many of the carols, like “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” are familiar, and “Once in Royal David’s City” has been a staple since 1919. But the service also includes new carols commissioned every year.
The impresario behind Nine Lessons and Carols is Stephen Cleobury, director of music for King’s College since 1982. Cleobury makes Bill Belichick look like a finalist for Mr. Congeniality, but he is just as passionate about music as Belichick is about football. Cleobury demands perfection and goes to extremes to attain it, as I learned in the BBC truck during rehearsal the day before the Christmas Eve performance.
Cleobury (the Brits pronounce it KLEE-bree) leaves nothing to chance. He insists that both the music and the readings be rendered in precise English elocution. Even the Lord’s Prayer is rehearsed with regimental precision.
Throughout the rehearsal, Cleobury was communicating with Simon Vivian, the producer in the BBC truck parked just outside of the King’s College quadrangle. Following each song, Cleobury and Vivian conferred by intercom.
“Is that too loud?” Cleobury asked. “In the middle of the verses they seem to bloom up,” Vivian responded. “It’s always that penultimate bar, isn’t it?” Then Cleobury instructed the members of the choir, “Could you write please on page 80 ‘Wait’? In capital letters?” The two exchanged observations about sibilants and worries about whether a particular passage was too percussive. “Boys, there are one or two of you scooping on bar 10,” Cleobury cautioned. Another time, Cleobury provided remedial instruction on French pronunciation.
Assessing a baritone solo, Vivian said, “I think he’s too wet,” meaning that the sound was too lush and wouldn’t translate well on the broadcast. On “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” Cleobury sternly instructed, “The basses will omit the quaver ‘A’ in the second bar.” And on another carol, “Let’s have a good forte at bar 41.” Vivian chimed in: “Nice bright ‘A’s from the front row, please.”
At times, now several hours into the rehearsal, Cleobury dealt with restive choristers. “I might have a talk to at the end about this proceeding,” he warned.
During a break for tea, Vivian briefed me on the challenges of broadcasting the King’s College Choir around the globe. No recording, and certainly no broadcast, he said, can capture the full range of sound coming from the choir, so the control truck must compress the sound. “It’s my job to read the scores and mitigate the quietist and loudest sections,” he said. “You can’t get a machine to do that.”
Following tea, the rehearsal continued. The opening stanza of “Once in Royal David’s City” is, without question, the star turn in Lessons and Carols, and Cleobury prepares four or five sopranos for that role. Only minutes before the performance, he nods to one, signaling that he is the chosen one. During rehearsal, one of the singers sang the part beautifully, but his voice cracked, almost imperceptibly, on the final line.
In the BBC truck, I wondered if that meant what I thought it meant. “Did he blow his chance?” I asked. “I suspect so,” Vivian responded.
“Thereby hangs a career,” Steve Richards, the sound engineer, added ruefully.
Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College represents the pursuit of a platonic ideal: perfection in choral music. The Anglican choral tradition is one of the glories of Western civilization, and if there is a more heavenly sound than a soaring descant, I have no clue what it might be. Cleobury may be a martinet, but he has devoted his entire career to the pursuit of ethereal music.
A few minutes after three o’clock on Christmas Eve, with the whole world listening, a flawless soprano sang the opening lines, his voice rising to the fan-vaulted ceiling and beyond into the cold night air. Once again, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was underway, amid candlelight and the smell of damp wool. The organ rumbled and the descants soared. When it was over, Cleobury even allowed himself a smile. “It’s always a great feeling when we get to the end,” he told me the day before.
On the way back to the hotel, beneath a nearly full moon, I stopped at the BBC truck for another opinion. “Excellent,” Simon Vivian said. “The choir were in superb form.” He said he’d already received a congratulatory call from the NPR producer in New York. “There were some magical moments,” Vivian said.
Magic indeed. Can perfection be far behind?
Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is chair of the Religion Department at Dartmouth College.